


in my heart she left a hole

by perennial



Category: Hatfields & McCoys (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Character Death Fix, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Non-Canon Relationship, Romeo and Juliet AU of sorts, rarepairs, two families trying to kill each other in post-Civil War Appalachia!!!!, what’s not to love about this story!!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2017-03-28
Packaged: 2018-08-24 00:20:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8348914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennial/pseuds/perennial
Summary: Cap wonders what it is that made her presence here different from any other time he's seen her, and those times a much improved version of herself. It wasn't even anything. It was walking into the same room where she was.





	1. Chapter 1

They’re Hatfields, so they love their family and to stir shit up, and that’s the beginning and end of what Cap and Johnse have in common. It’s enough. Family pride was the bedrock they were raised on, and the fraternal love that they inherited with their blood will exist as long as that same blood runs red.

That said, even within that short list there is a divide. Johnse’s shit-stirring is done at high volume and with a full audience, and still somehow the resultant trouble tends to be accidental. And there is always a sense, unspoken and unacknowledged, like a saltpeter vein running through the rock, that if Johnse had been given the chance to pick his family, he might not have chosen them.

But Cap, he aims straight and shoots sure. His blood runs just as hot and fast as the rest of them, but his moves are deliberate. Certain. As though he already knows something everyone else is about to find out. For him, there is only the family, and has only ever been the family.

And then, like a gunshot—a third thing.

Roseanna.

xx

There are a million reasons to not let on.

Cap doesn’t speak a word during supper. He crafted his poker face a long time ago, and his hands, accustomed to surges of adrenaline, hold his fork and knife as steady as they hold his rifle. But his ma will know with one syllable. Maybe that’s mothers. Maybe it’s just his. She knows things nobody’s ever told her. Gathers her clues where no one would think to look.

It isn’t hard to keep from drawing notice: his father doesn’t say a word either, silent for the same reason, though Anse wears his feelings openly on his glowering face. Johnse’s acting like this whole thing isn’t awkward as hell, talking up a storm to the girls, trying to build bridges between them and Roseanna like she belongs here, like she’s staying—and underneath it, a ripple of anger at his father, evident in the way he won’t look at him; a silent plea to his mother, who won’t cross the bridges of Johnse’s making. That’ll be for Roseanna to attempt. They’ve given her a rough trail to blaze, that’s one thing certain.

She’s stiff of movement and tongue; the environment is taking a toll. Can’t help that she’s been forced to take refuge under the roof of her enemy. Cap’s seen Roseanna McCoy fluid and golden and animated, and the woman across the table might be a changeling. He wonders what it is that made her presence here different from any other time he’s seen her, and those times a much improved version of herself. It wasn’t even anything. It was walking into the same room where she was.

As soon as he can get away, he slides into the twilight with a cigar and a resolve to set his head back in order. He’s always been honest with himself and he recognizes it’s no small thing, the thunder that started in his heart and filled his body to his ears and kneecaps.

He’s going to have to hide it away even from himself. He’s already seen the way she looks at his brother. He’s heard his father’s rage. There’s no point in wishing things different.

xx

The girls take to the newcomer easily enough. They’re too young to have a genuine reason to hate McCoys, and if they did Roseanna would make them forget it, what with her telling them jokes and stories while she helps them with chores, weaving flowers into their braids, sneaking them sugared pecans meant to be pie-fixings. Levicy is cordial but keeps her at arm’s length, purposely doesn’t mother on her. Mean Jim makes a few tasteless remarks that turn Roseanna red-faced and put Johnse in a fighting temper, and even Cap delivers Jim a couple shoves. Wall is kind, talks to her like a gentleman. Anse doesn’t talk to her unless he has to.

Johnse’s never learned to live inside his own head; everybody’s got to be there living his life alongside him. Him and Cap are splitting the limbs off a bunch of poplars when he stops and turns to his brother, the frustration in him evidently unable to let him labor and speak at the same time.

“What’re you thinkin’?” he demands. “Not that it’ll make a difference, but I gotta know.”

“Think you’re a dumbass, Jons.”

Well, that gets him going sure enough. Cap hacks branches all the way through a tirade about entirely pure motives and the small-mindedness of their kinfolk, which mutates into a sermon about how everyone would love Roseanna if they could just remember she was a woman before she was a McCoy.

Cap hefts a log. “You keep tellin’ everybody that, maybe they’ll believe you, by and by.”

“Don’t matter anyhow; I’m gonna marry her whatever happens.”

“I’m sure you ain’t. Not unless you can hoodwink both ol’ Randall and Pa into changing their minds, and even you ain’t that good, brother.”

“Only gotta get Pa. He’s the one keeping us from gettin’ hitched straightaway.”

“Boy, he’s a stone wall.”

“Roseanna’ll change his mind.”

Johnse tends to be confident to the point of blindness in the face of logic; Cap could remind him of half a dozen times his optimism has been ill-founded, and Johnse would only remind him of half a dozen times it’s seen him triumphant. But one thing’s right: if anyone could change Devil Anse’s mind, it’s sweet-hearted Roseanna McCoy. Which is how Cap knows he’ll never bend.

xx

Summer’s eve. The house is quiet, supper long since devoured and cleaned up. The fire and candles burn bright, softening all the edges of the room. Everyone is busy at their quiet pleasures: Anse reading, Levicy knitting, Johnse working out deliveries for his moonshine, Cap cleaning a rifle. Robert E. and Elliot are on the floor playing checkers. Betty and Elias have been asleep for hours already. Roseanna is on the supper bench, her fingers deftly braiding Mary’s hair; she’s already done Nancy Bell’s. Without looking, Levicy knows the instant the last strand of hair is tied up, and she turns around and gives the girls a look Cap knows well. They giggle their goodnights to the others and run off to bed. Roseanna looks a little wistful as she watches them go. Homesick, probably. He knows she has little sisters too.

Johnse stands and goes over to her, leaning down to say something quietly in her ear. Head bent over his gun, Cap watches out of the corner of his eye. He knows Anse and Levicy are doing the same.

Roseanna drops her eyes and smiles at Johnse’s shoulder. He reaches for her hand, and with fingers linked they make their way to the back door.

“Dark out,” drawls Anse, and there’s a different warning in his voice.

“We’s just taking a stroll, Pa.”

“Are you now.”

Johnse lifts his chin defiantly. Cap can’t see Roseanna’s face from where she stands behind him. “Yes sir. Too nice an evening to let it go to waste.”

“Maybe I’ll join you, then,” says Levicy, not lifting her eyes from her work.

For once Johnse is wise enough to keep his replies silent. The room waits.

“Cap, you go with ’em.”

“Aw, Pa—”

“Go on now.”

Cap slouches out behind the pair, wishing he could kick Johnse.

They walk in silence. The lovers are side by side but they’ve dropped each other’s hands. Everyone is moving too purposefully to rightly claim they’re on a stroll to enjoy the night air.

When they get to the treeline Johnse says, "You gonna get or what?"

"Jackass," Cap calls his brother. He asks Roseanna, "You really love this sumbitch?"

She turns eyes flooded with affection to Johnse. Cap looks away.

“I'll be at the barn,” he mutters, and walks off without looking back.

xx

She pulls her weight in a way that makes Cap oddly proud of her. Doesn’t complain, doesn’t protest, doesn’t put her hands on her hips and sigh. Doesn’t bend over backwards out of gratefulness either, reminding everyone she’s there on their charity. She could cut a pathetic figure but she’s got steel in her spine. The McCoy pride is a different beast in the daughter than in the father; it more closely resembles the one he sees in his mother and aunts, even his sisters sometimes. Funny world.

xx

“There's a big mean ol’ bass in that far northeast corner that Unc' Wall and Lias and Ellison and Pa been tryin’ to land since they was no bigger'n you. Now if you was to catch it, I reckon they'd make you king for a day. You’d get put in all the history books. Uncle Wall'd let you sit in his chair.”

Rob's eyes are big as saucers. He looks to Johnse for confirmation.

“Whatcha gawpin’ at me for? You listen to Cap, he knows what he's talkin’ about.”

“Now the trick, or so I heard,” Cap continues, “is that you gotta climb out on that big branch. You gotta get all covered with mud in disguise, cos he’s such a crafty ol’ devil that he knows what humans look like. And then you climb up there and drop waterbugs down on the water, they gotta be alive cos that crafty devil knows what dead bait is. And then when he’s near the surface you pull up your big net that’s hidden in the mud—did I mention you gotta go there at night when the ol’ devil’s sleeping, so he don’t know there’s a net there? You gotta hide a net in the mud at midnight and attach the lines to the tree so’s you can pull it—and then when he’s eatin’ all them waterbugs and thinkin’ how clever he is, you pull up your net, and you tie it to the branch until he stops breathin’ cos if you land him he’ll just crawl back into the water. And then you’ll be the one who finally caught the ol’ devil, and you’ll be king for a day. Simple as that.”

Elliot is suspicious; he's always been more pragmatic than his older brother. “If it's so easy why ain'tcha caught it yourself?”

“Got him in the air once, but he chewed through the net.”

Rob’s jaw drops; Elliot’s face screws up in unbelief. Johnse says, “Here’s the girls.”

Cap watches his sisters and Roseanna walk down the hill. They are laden with picnic baskets and blankets, and they’re laughing as they approach. He shifts himself and goes to carry Roseanna’s big basket for the last stretch; she relinquishes it with a smile.

He cracks the lid open and whoops. “Chicken and hot biscuits, boys! Lemonade—yella cheese—coleslaw—strawberry preserves, I tell you what, we about to eat like we’s the president!”

“And I got the apple turnovers,” says Mary importantly, and then has to run away with her basket from the hungry hands of Johnse.

Roseanna repossesses her basket from Cap and unpacks the food. “Alright, alright,” she tells Rob and Elliot, who are practically salivating as they hover. “Hold your horses.”

Everyone stuffs themselves. Roseanna makes her coleslaw different than they do, more eggs than vinegar, and they give her a ribbing about how things are done here in West Virginia, but Cap likes how it tastes. The younger boys finish any turnovers that are left. Suffice to say everyone’s supper is spoilt.

Afterward, when he’s too full and sated to do anything but sit against a tree with his hat pulled low over his eyes, pretending to fish, Roseanna wanders over to him. Johnse’s swinging Robert E. back and forth by his heels—somebody’s going to be sick soon. Nancy Bell is asleep on the picnic blanket. Mary and Elliot wade in the shallows, hunting crawdads.

She says, “You still drivin’ into town tomorrow?”

“Yep. Pickin’ up a saddle.”

“There room for me in the wagon?”

“Reckon so.”

She says, a little louder, “Thought I’d get some things at Patton’s.”

“That’ll be fine.”

She stands next to him, not saying anything. He lifts his hat brim enough to look up at her.

She’s watching his line. “Think you caught something.”

He drops his hat back into place. “Aw, let it be,” he says. “Let it be.”

xx

Johnse hands Roseanna up into the wagon. Half standing, she lowers her head to his to kiss him goodbye. Cap snaps the leads and the wagon jolts forward.

“Cap!” she protests, lurching back into her seat. She turns around to wave to Johnse, who is set to spend the afternoon making deliveries and won’t be anywhere near town.

The day is warm, but most of the wagon track is shaded by overarching trees. A breeze teases at the nag’s mane and lifts the ribbons of Roseanna’s hat. She sits as easy beside him as she would be next to Johnse or one of her brothers.

She says, “You see that hog Rob's raising?”

“Sure did. Got into my tobacco patch.”

“Blue ribbon hog's gonna have blue ribbon tastes.” Laughter is brimming in her eyes, on the verge of spilling out.

“You wait. When that thing breaks into the garden and digs up all your carrots, you'll be ready for a pig roast.”

He parks the wagon at a fence under the sprawling shade of an old oak. Levicy asked him to stop at the post office; he attends to this task first, and Roseanna accompanies him.

A small crowd is gathered inside: the mail coach must have just come through. Some quiet greetings are sent his way. The glances cast at Roseanna range from covert to outright sneers. Cap hooks his thumbs in his belt, widening his stance. Not all of them look away, but they don’t say anything.

Roseanna stands quietly, eyes forward; but he can see her jaw clench. There is nothing in the post for her, of course.

When they step back outside, squinting in the sunlight, she says, “How long will you be?”

“Take your time.” He holds up the newspaper he picked up with the post. They part ways, she to the mercantile, him to the wainwright.

It takes only a few seconds to learn that the saddle isn’t finished—he wasn’t expected until tomorrow. He returns to the wagon and settles back, feet propped up, hat pulled low to shade his eyes. The newspaper contains nothing out of the ordinary: the same old griping about the government and attempts to lure readers westward, but he supposes even he can stand to know what’s happening outside of Tug Fork.

A familiar blur of blue-grey plaid appears further up the street. Over the top of the sheet of newsprint, he watches Roseanna walk out of Patton’s doorway and down the boardwalk. She looks over her shoulder both ways before turning around the corner into the shallow passage between the mercantile and the bank. Within the alley, two more blonde heads appear—Alifair and Kay, waiting to embrace her.

Cap smiles to himself and returns his attention to the article begging him to help clean up all the gold getting underfoot in California.

xx

She’s not one of the family—no one forgets that for a moment—but she’s become a seamless part of the house. She goes to their parties and plays their games. She sits with them in church. She pulls weeds in the vegetable garden and milks the cows and helps make the little ones' new clothes every time they gain a few inches.

They’ve all learned the sound of her laugh, low and lovely. Levicy likes her company, happy to have another grown woman about the place. Even Anse is kind to her, though less so when Johnse’s near.

He doesn’t know what to call it. She’s not a friend or a servant or a guest. But they speak to her as though she’s one of their own, treat her like there was never a time she didn’t live among them.

And yet everyone is always conscious of the divide.

xx

Mary brings Cap a blackberry tart.

“I got one. Give that to Roseanna,” he tells her.

Mary complies, dancing across the room to where a checkers tournament is going on between Elliot and Roseanna against Robert E. and Johnse.

Roseanna accepts the treat with a smile. “My sister’s favorite tarts are blackberry.”

“Johnse says you’re _our_ sister now,” says Mary.

The room seems to lose all its air in half a moment. Levicy coughs quietly: a warning.

Anse says, “You been telling your sister lies, son?”

Johnse’s chin goes up, proud, defiant. Beside him Roseanna’s eyes fall to her hands, now folded in her lap. “They ain’t lies, sir. Roseanna and I gonna be married just as soon as some folks come to their senses.”

There’s fire in Anse’s eyes. “How many times do I gotta say it—”

Cap can’t see his mother’s face, but he sees his father’s eyes flick her way, and after a moment Anse’s shoulders relax slightly.

“We’ll see about that,” says Anse gruffly.

Roseanna’s right hand rises from her lap to clasp Johnse’s. He looks down at her and subsides.

Cap leaves the room.

xx

He says, “Where Roseanna at? Patton’s got that green thread she were wantin’.—Ma?”

xx

“What’s bitin’ yer ass?” growls Jim.

He doesn’t answer. The rifle against his shoulder is steady, and he aims at the knothole in the oak about thirty yards distant—just the height of a man. His brother, maybe.

He fires. The wood explodes in a shower of bark and splinters.

They go to the saloon and Cap doesn’t leave until he has thrown back an entire bottle of whiskey on his own and lost twelve dollars at cards and got punched in the face twice in a fight he started and Mean Jim and Skunkhair have to haul him out by force.


	2. Chapter 2

Roseanna comes out on the porch so fast Cap thinks she must have been standing at the window watching him ride up. He looks down at her from the saddle. Almost a year. All the blood in his body is drumming in his ears. Her hair like wheat-tops. Her belly flat. But for the startling pallor of her face, she might have left yesterday.

There isn’t a trace of a smile to be found on her. “I don’t care to hear anything Johnse’s got to say.”

“Ain’t here for Johnse.” He says it low and steady, so she’ll believe him. “Word is I got a niece. Got somethin’ for her.”

He fishes around in a saddlebag and pulls out a small wooden horse, whittled into soft edges that won’t hurt a young’un. He tosses it to her; she catches it against her ribs and turns it over in her hands.

She doesn’t speak for a moment.

“You made this?”

“Yes’m.”

“For her?”

“Yes’m. Reckon she’ll like it?”

She swallows, deciding. He sends up a prayer so quick and fierce it doesn’t have words. She says, “Why don’t you come inside and we’ll find out.”

Roseanna is protective, guiding his hands as though he hasn’t handled the multitude of offspring produced by his own clan, but with one brush of her fingers he’s turned into an addict. He lets her fuss and adjust, hyperaware of her hand against his elbow, of her knuckles against his chest as she fixes the blanket.

He stares at the human in his arms. She’s so feather-light he wouldn’t know she was there if he wasn’t looking at her. She looks peaky, nothing like the fat red infants his house seems to be always overflowing with. It’s Johnse’s nose, maybe. He doesn’t know how you’re supposed to tell with babies, they all look the same, never look anything like what they turn into. He’s heard grandmothers clucking over foreheads and chins, comparing generations, pretending they remember. Sometimes one will even more resemble other members of the family—he’s heard. He looks for bits of himself but anything that might be him is probably just Johnse.

But those are Roseanna’s blue eyes, he won’t give those to his brother. Her fine eyebrows. The baby wakes up and after that he gets better at it, picking out parts of both parents amid the blend. Their features keep surfacing as though bobbing up and down at the watertop.

He’s content to sit and look; in his experience there’s not much else to do with a baby except sing or sit real still in the hopes it won’t swell up and go off like an overheated still. Roseanna croons softly, coaxing one clenched fist open with her index finger. She waves the wooden horse enticingly without garnering much of a reaction. Eventually the blue eyes drift closed and the baby is returned to the cradle: his cue to go.

She walks him out. They both pull their wrappings tighter against the chill; spring is late this year. There’s a pair of gloves in his saddlebags and he digs around for them with one hand, the other holding the reins. Roseanna watches, waiting for him to mount.

He looks at the circles under her eyes, the colorlessness of her lips and cheeks. He looks at her limp hair, the slumped set of her shoulders. This is his brother’s doing. This is his father’s doing.

"Y’all alright here? Got enough to eat?"

She stares at him. "I’m a McCoy."

"You know, that really burns me up, Roseanna. That baby, she’s family. You was almost as close. A year under the same roof but a soul’d never know it, the way you talk."

She’s looking at him as though she’s never seen him before. "You don’t want me dead?"

"The hell you take me for, Miss McCoy?"

She scoffs, incredulous.

"There’s a few of your kin I wouldn’t mind the world bein’ short of," he allows, "and I’m sure the feelin’s mutual." He pauses to give her a moment to agree.

"A few."

"But you ain’t one of ’em."

Now she’s silent, wondering if she’s meant to concur again, probably wondering if she does. He’d give almost anything to know what she’s thinking, but instead he rushes on—

“Sarah Elizabeth neither. You reckon you’ll let me come back and visit now an’ again?”

As he rides away he wonders if that’s how Johnse always manages to talk people into doing what he wants—just keep surprising them until they’re too confused to say anything but yes.

xx

The cottage is like another world. No killing, no wrath, no guns, no plans. He can’t say when he stops looking over his shoulder for McCoys in the undergrowth. Roseanna’s family doesn’t visit her here any more than they did when she lived among Hatfields.

Her aunt’s sending him foul looks from across the room, as usual. Cap sends them right back—he didn’t grow up in a house with Mary for nothing—and she turns haughty, starts busying herself making meat pies. She’s probably going to fill the house with savory smells and then not invite him to stay for supper. He doesn’t much care. He didn’t come here to eat.

It’s like stepping into a different life. No family pride to uphold or businesses to protect. No slights, no revenge. Just Sarah taking wobbly steps toward him as her mother, wreathed in smiles, encourages her forward.

He praises her loudly, scoops her up, tickles her until she chuckles. She pulls experimentally at his moustache. She knows who he is now; she’ll hold her arms up to him when she sees him. He’s pleased to see her features are going to take after Roseanna’s. Somehow she’s gotten Levicy’s smile.

When he leaves, Aunt Betty is waiting by the front door with her arms crossed. "She ain’t yours," she reminds him as he passes.

"Ain’t she?" he snarls.

He never likes lying to his family, so he doesn’t. He’ll slip away when no one’s paying attention and show up hours later with a brace of coneys or a line of trout. No one questions his disappearances. He’s followed this pattern so many times that they draw their own assumptions.

He’s learned from more than one of Johnse’s mistakes.

xx

They aren’t much for doctors but Cap thinks someday he’s going to find one who knows about the brain and have them explain a few things. Like why when he leaves the cottage his heart is cooled like iron in water but all it takes is the sight of one of those ugly McCoy faces to turn his hatred red-hot again. Make his stomach turn, knowing they walk the earth. Make him wish they’d give him a good reason to pull out his gun and shoot them all in the head.

xx

“She asks for you all the time,” says Roseanna. “She’s gettin’ too attached. Think you better stop comin’ round.”

He hefts the ax and splits another log. Three. Four.

“We don’t see you for weeks on end and I don’t know if you’re alive or dead. What am I meant to tell her when you stop showin’ up for good?”

He picks up a stack of split logs and starts walking toward the house. “Ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“Better not,” she says. “’Cause if you break that little girl’s heart I’ll never forgive you, Cap Hatfield.”

xx

“Y’all go on,” Aunt Betty says. “I’ll watch her for a piece.”

“We won’t be long. Just to the spring and back.” Roseanna takes off her apron and dons her sunhat.

The sky is brilliant blue above them, full of white clouds that a breeze is busy knocking around. Streams of sunshine light up the flowers along the bank and turn all the leaves above their heads into partially-translucent shades of lime and yellow and russet.

He skips a rock across the rippling water. She holds back a branch so he can pass by without it hitting his face and he immediately walks into a spiderweb. They take turns imitating bird calls, trying to get the feathered counterparts to answer. They find a low, narrow point in the stream—he marches through the water; she clutches her skirts and picks her way carefully across a series of rocks. He stands where the water runs over the toes of his boots and holds his hand out, and for half a breath her palm presses to his, and then her shoes are on the bank and his hand is empty.

The color is high in her face. Her eyes are bright. Her feet hardly touch the ground.

She says, “Do you know—a year ago I’d have never believed I could be this happy.”

“She’s a special kid.”

She begins to speak, then stops. They clamber over a log that has fallen across the stream. The shore vanishes for a while, requiring them to scale an embankment constructed of a series of boulders. A bit further upstream the land flattens again, and the shore is wide enough for them to stroll mostly side by side.

“And what about you? You happy?”

“Sure.” He pushes a leafy bough aside. “What ain’t there to be happy about?”

She spins a violet between her thumb and index finger. “I wouldn’t know. You never talk about yourself.”

“I work, I hunt… go to the saloon. Sleep, that’s about it.”

“Never wanted more than that?”

He scratches behind his ear. “Maybe a little more.”

“A place of your own,” she suggests.

“Ain’t no such thing in my family. Anybody’s house is everybody’s house, don’t know if you noticed.”

She grins in acknowledgement.

“You want more.” At her look of curiosity, he says, “You—used to talk about it.”

“I wanted to be where he was, wherever that was. Turns out what I got now’s closer to what I were truly wishin’ for.”

The spring is nothing special, just a destination point, but the bubbling water and the sunlit woods are peaceful. They stop for a while to sit on the rocks and watch the water flow by.

Roseanna says, “It ain’t just Sarah, you know. Why I’m happy.”

“Me neither.”

She smiles. The sun hits her head from behind and a little to the side, making her hair glow like it’s a source of light itself. Her eyes are blue as the sky.

If he kisses her it will ruin everything. He knows it as sure as he knows how to sight down a target. She hasn’t given him the slightest hint it’d be welcome. It maybe hasn’t even occurred to her that he feels the way he does. Granted, he hasn’t done much that might keep her awake nights. He doesn’t know what he’s waiting for, really. A sign. She’s maybe still aching for Johnse, despite her words. She’s maybe not interested in picking up with another Hatfield man. Whatever it is, if he kisses her now he knows she’ll never let him come back. He trusts his gut: the time ain’t right.

xx

It takes a long time for the whole family to drop handfuls of dirt in the grave, one person at a time, while the rest stand in somber silence. The day is insensitively beautiful, but at least the ground isn’t frozen.

Cap watches his father and uncles. Wonders who him and his brothers will turn out most like, if they’re still around in twenty years. Wonders which ones will keep him rational, charitable. Which ones will make him so angry he sees red but still possess his loyalty. Which ones will help teach his offspring to dance and shoot and drink, which ones will kill for them. Which ones will leave his world forever unbalanced when they move on to the next.

xx

“Roseanna!” He pounds on the door with both fists. “Roseanna!”

There’s no point in busting the lock—they’ve put something heavy on the other side. “Get out of here, you miserable gutless child-killing coward!” Aunt Betty screeches.

“I ain’t leaving ‘til she comes out here, you tell her that.” He yells, “You hear, Roseanna?”

He could break a window but he doesn’t want to. He returns to the base of the steps and paces back and forth. Maybe— He runs around the house to the back door, which they’ve also barricaded. She knows him better than he thought. But they missed the kitchen window: it’s cracked open, and it’s the work of a moment to shove it open and vault inside. He’s down the hall and into Roseanna’s bedroom before Aunt Betty, rifle in hand, can react. He drives the bolt home behind him.

A hairbrush comes flying at his head. “My brothers!” Roseanna screams. “You think the longer you stay away, I'll forget—”

She launches herself at him, hitting anywhere she can reach. He catches her by both wrists. It takes all his strength to hold her: she fights in his grasp like a wildcat.

“You think I wanted to do it? Dammit, Bud’s hardly older than Rob—”

“WAS,” she screams. “Was older, he’s _dead_ now, thanks to you and your wretched family, you hateful—butchering— _bastards_!”

She finally manages to yank herself loose and skitters halfway across the room. She turns her back to him, rubbing her wrists.

From the other side of the door, Betty’s yells are finally audible: “Roseanna? What you doing in there, you devil’s spawn? Roseanna, you alright?”

“Yes, Aunt Betty.”

“You get outta there, Cap Hatfield, you filthy good for nothing—”

“I’ll leave when I’m good and ready! Now I’ve got business with your niece, you gonna let me finish it?”

He can hear her grumbling, but she moves away from the door.

Cap puts both hands flat on the bureau and leans against it, staring down at patterns in the wood grain. Silence hangs in the bedroom for a few heartbeats.

"They done murder. It were an execution, Roseanna. It were justice, everybody understood that, your brothers, your parents, everybody understood."

"Devil Anse ain't a judge."

She sounds like Perry Cline. Funny how, even ostracized this long, she's still a McCoy through and through. He doesn't reply.

"Did you shoot to kill?"

That isn't what she's really asking.

"Yes."

She seems to fold up inside herself.

It needs saying: “Johnse shot at the trees.”

Anse doesn't know this, and Cap isn't supposed to. That big mouth of Johnse’s is going to catch him a bullet someday whether there's blood on his hands or not. Just like Johnse to think he can keep a foot in both camps. His poor, shortsighted brother, whose greatest virtue and greatest flaw is that he can't help loving everybody, he doesn't know when to stop.

Cap tells Roseanna, “You make sure Sarah knows that. Her pa didn't kill her uncles.”

It’s a meager offering, especially when everybody else is spilling as much blood as they can. Hell, all of them'll probably be dead at each other's hands by the time everything’s said and done, but there's no reason Sarah has to start her life knowing it. Anyway, fair’s fair, she's going to have enough poison poured down her ears by Aunt Betty. She ought to have a reason to think being half a Hatfield’s worthwhile. He doesn't know if that's Johnse. Maybe Levicy. Sure as hell ain't Jim. Not Cap neither, he's gone too far, killed too many of her kin. And then he thinks _dammit, why do I care so much._

Roseanna’s voice hardens. “He was there, though. He were part of it.”

“He's a Hatfield. That won't never change.”

She’s silent, head bent, arms crossed.

He looks for his hat—it got knocked off in the tussle. Best be going. He probably won’t be coming back, come to think of it. So much for giving it some time. He wonders where Sarah Elizabeth is—he’d like one last look at her. He wishes he’d kissed Roseanna by the spring.

She turns her head so that he can see some of her profile. “I’m sorry about Ellison.”

He pauses.

“How’s Cotton holding up?”

“Been better.”

She nods shortly.

He waits. She opens her mouth to speak a few times; it takes a few tries before the words come out. “Will you tell me—will you tell me anything they did or said? At the end?”

Oh, Roseanna. “’Course. ’Course I will.”

He pulls the chair over to the bed, and she sits on the bed and he sits in the chair and he recounts everything he can remember, and it’s all the truth except for the parts he’ll never tell her, not ever.

xx

They bury Skunkhair a ways back from the church, and up until the time when a visit to town means a guaranteed bullet in the forehead, Cap’s stopping by the grave once or twice a day. After the family relocates to the safe house, despite everything he’s still visiting by night so often that Anse finally has to forbid him from going. He respects his father, so he cuts his graveside vigils from every other night to once a week.

He’ll bring a pot of Johnse’s shine and sit with his back propped against the headstone, sipping. He’s careful to only drink just enough to dull the ache, never so much that he loses track of the world around him; he has to keep his ears sharp. He sits there with just a stack of dirt between him and Tom’s rotting remains, wonders if he’s tempting fate. It’s disrespecting of the dead to stand right atop of their grave, his ma taught him that, but it’s probably more to do with how morbid it feels, knowing sooner or later he’ll have a spot like this of his own.

He’ll listen to the night sounds, pretend it’s the old days, that Tom’s sitting there sipping in companionable silence. He’ll watch the moon far and white above him, use its place in the sky to track the hour. Wonder how his life got so dang crowded and so lonely at the same time.

He misses Tom. Mean Jim’s no kind of replacement for the kid Cap learned the timber trade alongside. He misses Johnse, always gone at his still. He misses the crowd at the saloon. He misses Aunt Betty’s cottage and everything within.

One night he gets to the grave and finds flowers. Not cut ones, growing ones: they’ve been planted there in front of the stone, he can see where the dirt has been turned over. Night-bloomers. Moonflowers. Set off to the left a little, like somebody knew.

xx

Johnse stops in with the coals of his temper already stoked by his McCoy bride, and Jim obligingly fans the flames into a shouting match with Anse over that self-same wife and her hell-born brother. More trouble than they’re worth, Cap thinks, all these love affairs of Johnse’s.

“Ever wish you’d let him marry her?" he asks Levicy later, after Johnse’s gone and the men cleared out to check their traps. She’s scrubbing out a soup pot, getting ready to make a stew of the coneys he just skinned.

“Who, Roseanna? When that baby come along I did. We’d of took care of them even when he lost interest.” She sighs, resting her arms against the rim. “You know what he’s like. Thought I was giving her a chance.”

He turns his knife over in his hands, watching the way the light from the window hits the blade. “Ma,” he says.

“Don't be telling me nothin’ you don't want your father knowin’.”

He shoves his chair back, stands, picks up his hat. Going to her, he kisses her cheek. “Anybody asks, I’ll be back in time for supper.”

xx

Aunt Betty stands on the porch, arms crossed, frowning. Roseanna says, “What are you doin’ here? You’re meant to be in hiding!”

“I know it,” he retorts. “But I can’t let Sarah forget about me, can I?” He lifts his head and whistles.

“You oughta leave, Cap, I got a bad feelin’.”

“I checked my trail, don’t you fret.” He loops the reins around a porch rail.

A blur of wheat-gold streaks out of the house and flings itself at his middle. He gives a whoop and locks his hands under her arms, swings her high. She shrieks with laugher, her body slack, sure of his grip on her. He drops her to his hip and she locks her arms around his neck tight as a possum tail.

“Now you tell me everything you said and done since I seen you.”

She obliges, and he’s regaled with a tale of chickens and frogs told with all the energy and fluency of a three-year-old. He listens closely, asks questions and makes admiring noises when appropriate, and at the end lifts his chin to indicate their disapproving audience.

“You tell your mama you want me to stay the afternoon.”

“It ain’t safe,” Roseanna persists.

“Roseanna,” he says, “who on earth is gonna look for me here?”

“It ain’t here I’m worried about. You’re on the wrong side of the river, and the woods are crawling with those bounty hunters, and those are long miles back to your people when every _second_ is a chance for you to catch a bullet in the heart—”

Betty makes a warning sound, nods to the young ears he holds.

“The way y’all talk,” he says casually, “you’d think I never held a gun before. Let alone was the best sharpshooter round the Tug.”

“Aw, go on with you,” says Betty, reaching for Sarah. “And good riddance, too.”

Sarah Elizabeth, to his gratification, makes a noise of protest and clings tightly to his neck.

“Excuse us, ladies,” he tells the others. “We got us a game of graces to play.”

Games with his niece inevitably dissolve into races around the yard. He runs around with her for a while, swings her through the air so many times in a row he gets out of breath, and leaves her giggling and spinning in the red and yellow leaves.

Roseanna has been watching them from the porch. He drops into the rocking chair next to hers. He lifts his eyebrows and smiles slightly, and she mirrors him.

“Still wish I’d stayed away?”

“Don’t make me answer that. Drink your lemonade. Sarah! Come here, look what’s here for you. Come on now, while it’s cold.”

“Should be a mild winter,” he observes. “The big oak is late dropping its leaves.”

“Ain’t it pretty? It looks like fire. I can see it from almost every room in the house.”

She rocks her chair back and forth with one foot. He looks at her sitting with her head tipped back against the headrest, face serene, a repeat image from times when she lived with his family. He wonders if she used to do this at her family’s homestead, too.

“You ever wonder—ever ask—How’d we get here? How’d it come to this?”

She rests her glass against her stomach. “Spite. Pride.”

 _Sins of the father._ The phrase has been rolling around in Cap’s head for days, ever since hearing it from the pulpit in a sermon directed at Anse, who wasn’t listening. The reverend can be a right windbag but Cap thinks this time he’s got it right. Their fathers started this war and gave the weight to their kin to carry. And now there’s blood on their hands and hatred in his heart that he’s never been sure is his own or his father’s, and the guilty and innocent alike suffer the consequences.

“Sometimes I think it won’t end until we done killed everybody. Other times I can’t believe we’s still fighting. Look at all the lives wrecked. All the people dead, Ellison, Tom, Bill. Your brothers an’ cousins. Who’s next? An’ _you_. All the things been done to you, Roseanna, I sometimes wonder how you can stand it.”

Roseanna says quietly, “Leave me off that list.”

He looks at her, surprised.

“This ain’t the life I’d’a chosen, sure. I miss my family. I miss my dead brothers and—it gets lonesome. But. Some of the sweetest things I got now, I’d never’ve thought to ask for. I’d never’ve thought to want.”

He keeps breathing, keeps his gaze forward. He doesn’t want to see her eyes, because he knows the answer to his constant question will be there, and if they are empty of the answer he wants he doesn’t know if he can bear to know it. And then he can’t take it and he looks, but she’s turned her face toward her daughter, who is calling for her attention, and when she turns back to him her eyes are clear.

xx

It was supposed to end it.

When he rides up she’s waiting on the porch. He dismounts and walks up to the house. His hands hang loose by his sides. His good eye is fixed on her face, pale and set—and yet today when he looks at her he keeps seeing Alifair’s face, Calvin’s face, as though theirs have been layered over hers.

The sky is overcast, the sort of greyish-white that means impending snow. His coat is buttoned all the way to his throat but she wears only a shawl. A rifle is nestled against her shoulder, cocked and pointing at him.

He holds his hands up in surrender. "Forgive me," he says. He walks right up to the barrel’s mouth. "Forgive me." His forehead touches cold metal.

Her dry, red-rimmed eyes look down at him. Her jaw is tight. Neither of them move for a heartbeat, and another, and another.

Her face crumples. She lowers the rifle. He steps up onto the porch and wraps her in his arms.

The gun slides out of her hand onto the porch. Her forehead is pressed to his breastbone. He presses his lips to her hair, tears running down his own face. She clutches his shirt, shuddering with nearly-silent, wracking sobs.

He holds her as she breaks apart.

xx

Funny how a place can be so quiet, peaceful, and one minute a person can be talking about how to fix supper when they don’t have any salt handy and wondering how long ’til they can forsake the tranquility of the woods and go home—and the next those peaceful hollows transform into spaces that function to conceal or expose, and the shape of one or the other might be the difference between seeing tomorrow or not, and there’s blood on the ground and a void where one of life’s constants used to be.

Funny ain’t the word.

xx

Cap watches his brother pack. It doesn’t take long.

“Will you do somethin’ for me?” Johnse says. “I been meanin’ to say goodbye to Roseanna and the baby. But with Bad Frank’s boys everywhere, wasn’t never able to get over there.”

Cap says, “I’ll make sure she knows.”

xx

He’s exhausted. Staying on the horse would be difficult enough to do in the daylight, but now he has only moonlight to guide his blurring eyes. Dismounting takes his full attention. Somehow he makes it across the yard.

Aunt Betty greets him at the door. "Oh, praise Jesus. She hain’t et in two days." She steers him into the kitchen and goes to fetch her niece. He falls into a chair beside the stove and closes his eyes.

It’s a grey-faced Roseanna who enters the room. She falls on him with a cry. From the babble that flows from her lips he gathers that all they’ve gotten news of was the battle itself, about the McCoy survivors—there was no word of the Hatfields and no way to ask.

He’s too tired to protest as she checks for injuries; she ignores his assurances that he’s unhurt. When she discovers the bullet wound in his shoulder he has to tell her about the mountain ambush, and she goes so quiet he wonders if she’s heard something outside to alarm her.

“When’s the last time you ate?” she asks and starts putting together a plate without waiting for an answer. He dozes while she works, stretching his long legs out in front of the heat of the stove.

With some food in him he revives somewhat. She directs her anxious energy to pounding dried corn into meal and he watches without speaking. It’s enough to simply look. He takes in the whole of her, from golden hair to dirty hem, acutely aware that this might be the last time he ever sees her.

 _Thank the Lord, thank the Lord,_ he thinks, just like he has been for weeks. _Thank you Lord she weren’t in that cabin too._

She brings him a clean shirt that once belonged to Betty’s now-dead husband and helps him replace his war-stained one. When all the buttons are done up he rests his temple against hers and breathes out slowly. She pulls him into a hug, and for a while all they do is stand there, spent and relieved, until the pain in his shot-up shoulder prevents him from holding his arm at that angle any longer.

“Stop fussin’, Roseanna, that wound’s fine. I got news.” He brushes her hair back from her face. “My pa wants to call a truce.”

“A truce? You mean—end it?”

“For good.”

“But that means—y’all gonna come out of hidin’? Cap—they’ll arrest you—”

He nods.

She goes white. “They’ll hang you, oh God above—”

"Nah, they’ll have me kick up my heels in prison a bit. They done give Uncle Wall life but he’s fightin’ it, gonna get out early. That ain’t too hard to stomach." At any rate it’s easier to face than hanging. He looks around the kitchen. “You gonna be alright here? Y’all got enough to eat? Got enough winter stores?”

“We're fine,” she says impatiently. “We got a lot less to worry over than you do right now.”

“I’ll be worryin’ over y’all otherwise.”

“You sure you’ll get out early? How long you thinkin’?”

“Depends. Can’t be sure yet how it’ll all shake out. Wall never hurt nobody, might be different for the rest of us. If it’s the noose for sure, I’ll go to Tennessee. Let things cool down here.”

He picks up her hands and holds them; they’re warm and steady, and they tighten around his. When he touches her the probable future seems a little less awful.

He argued with himself the whole way over and finally decided not to say the words, but here they are, escaping while his guard is down:

“Will you wait for me?”

She gently removes his hands and steps back.

The quiet of the kitchen is broken only by the crackling and snapping of the logs in the fireplace. The firelight and the oil lamps throw shadows and light in alternating patterns across the room; her eyes are darkened, focused on a spot beneath his collar. All these deaths, he thought he’d gotten used to how it feels to have his world flip over and backwards. Tom, Ellison, Jim, they got nothing on this. It’s like being burned alive.

Her expression is troubled. “You don’t gotta—We been friends. I never expected more.”

He stares at the floor. His jaw is clenched so tight that the ache of it radiates all the way through his head. Her words seem to register one at a time. He says slowly, “What’re you talkin’ about?”

“You always been good to us. But this—You’ll regret it, Cap, might take a while but you will.”

The rush of anger is a relief; it steadies his pounding heart. He says, “You think I’m askin’ cause I feel obliged? To do you a favor? Roseanna.” He take a step forward, holds her eyes with his. “I killed people, I done raise a ruckus up and down the river, and now I gotta go to prison or disappear. I ain’t _honorable_. And anyhow, that ain’t why I’m askin’! Why you think I come here every chance I get?”

Her brow furrows; her eyes search his. Like she doesn’t know him at all.

He runs his hand through his hair, frustrated, not sure how to fix this, horribly suspicious it can’t be fixed. His skin doesn’t fit right, feels too tight.

“It ain’t gonna change for me. If you don’t love me back, after all this time, I reckon it ain’t gonna change for you neither.” He turns to go, the world is a blur, he makes it all the way to the dirt at the base of the porch steps before he’s halted by her voice behind him.

“Cap, wait— _ **wait** ,_ just let me get my head on straight!”

She’s standing at the top of the stairs and all of a sudden he’s back at the beginning, holding out a wooden toy. And further back, walking up to his family home as she churns butter on the porch with Nancy Bell. He looks at her and finally understands. She’s scared of happiness, Roseanna. She’s wondering how fast the ground’s going to fall out from under her.

If he were Johnse he’d bound up the stairs and kiss the resistance out of her, but he ain’t Johnse. It isn’t enough to trick her body into submission and leave her mind to doubt and regret. If she’s going to be his, he wants all of her.

“Think on it,” he says. “You don’t gotta answer now. Matter of fact you better not. I might be gone a piece.”

Then he turns and mounts and is gone down the road before he can change his mind.

It isn’t until he’s almost home that he realizes he’s left behind his damn hat.


	3. Chapter 3

He’s never understood people like… Johnse, say. People who could just up and go and not look back. People who could put up a roof somewhere else altogether and say that’s their life, when they’ve left all the rest of themselves behind.

Cap puts in good work for a wainwright who gives few orders and asks fewer questions. And while he doesn’t necessarily keep his fists clean or his mouth shut he manages to keep his head down long enough to get the all clear. Long enough to have laid out what anybody else would call a life.

“You could stay,” says the wainwright.

“No I couldn’t,” says Cap, and disappears from town as though he was never there.

xx

Summer’s come early this year. He takes off his jacket and hooks it over his shoulder as he walks.

It’s a pleasant stroll. The sun falls through the swaying leaves of tall old trees and throws beams of light across his path. Heart high, he runs his gaze over old familiar dips in the mountainside, listening to the sound of his boots on the rocks and dirt. He relearns old things—like the bend in the road before the turnoff, the boulder he thought was on the left side but is on the right, the stream that starts further down the slope than he remembers. He thought his memory had served better; maybe it’s just time working on the land.

The cottage looks exactly the same. Blooming flowers are out in full force. The door frame has a fresh coat of paint on. A few fat hens cluck in the dirt yard. He pauses by the big old oak to run his fingers over the top of a gravestone engraved _Betty Blankenship_ , a gesture of affection that would have surprised both parties had they been warned it would occur.

The front door is wide open. Inside, pie fixings in various states of readiness are spread across the kitchen table: peeled vegetables and whole, cut fruit and whole, a pan empty of anything but dough, a bowl full of flour.

Her back is to him; she is crouched in front of the stove, adding fuel to its yellow innards. She hears the footsteps and calls without turning:

"Sarah-liz, you get right back out to that barn, those milk pails need a good hour's worth of scrubbing and you only been out there fifteen—"

She straightens, glances over her shoulder, freezes. There’s a stranger in her house, a man, and he hears her alarm and anger in the two short syllables that leave her mouth.

"What do—"

Then—a sharp intake of breath.

She stumbles toward him, knocking into a chair that hasn’t been pushed under the table, her eyes locked on his face. And he doesn’t even register moving, all he knows is one minute he’s in the doorway and the next she’s filling up his arms.

She smells just the same. Her head is pressed to the spot in his shoulder that aches when it’s cold out; his face is buried in her hair, his jaw against the warm skin of her neck. He can feel her heartbeat through his shirt, racing in time with his.

She loosens her hold around his neck and moves back enough to see all of him. Her eyes have gone watery and Cap wonders if his look the same. She skims her palms over his chest as though confirming he’s really there, then reaches up and holds his face with both hands.

"You alright? It's been so long, I hain't known what to think—"

"I'm alright, I'm fine."

"How long you been back?"

"Come straight here. Horse done throw a shoe down by the creek, s'why I’m on foot."

She laughs, all breath, like still she can’t believe what’s in front of her eyes. "Where you been all this time?"

"Tennessee mostly. How’s y'all? You done okay?"

"We're fine, we been fine. Wait til you see how big Sarah is, I'll call her—"

He catches her by the elbow. "Hold on, Roseanna. I gotta know, first."

She searches his face. She whispers, "Still? After four years?"

"Lot longer'n that."

Her laugh catches on something like a sob. "Me too."

His throat closes up. It's a moment before he can say, "You mean that?"

Her answer is a smile that starts in the corner of her mouth and spreads across her face. He pulls her as close to him as he possibly can and bends his head down to hers and finally, finally kisses her, until the world is nothing but her breath and her heartbeat and her mouth, her mouth, her mouth.

He’s run versions of this scene through his mind so many times it’s almost too good to believe that reality matches his highest hopes. So he presses, like running his hands over wheel joinings, just to be sure. “I mean marriage, Roseanna. I mean for good. We’re each other’s until we die.”

She says, “You better have a long life ahead of you, Cap Hatfield. We got ourselves a lot of time to make up for.”

And with that, for the first time in years or maybe ever, his heart goes calm.

She isn’t short, Roseanna, but compared to him she’s a ways down. “Here,” she says, and steps onto a footstool, and suddenly her head is level with his. His hands automatically move to rest on her waist. He wants to keep kissing her but first he wants to look at her. His recollection of her face was starting to fray at the edges. She’s so much more distinct than he remembers. The way the light slants across her cheekbones. That specific way she has of closing her mouth. The length of her eyelashes; the bright eyes under them. He almost can’t breathe, struck with wonder at the soul he holds.

She reaches up to brush his hair away from his face. He realizes she’s studying him too. She says, “What now? You gonna get that parcel of land from your pa?”

“Depends. I been thinkin'—” He wonders if she’ll laugh. The idea is newly birthed, still fragile and untested. “I been thinkin' I might try my hand at the law. Attorney and such.”

She says, “Like Perry Cline?”

“Little bit. I’d wanna work for folks instead of aginst ’em.”

“Praise the Lord,” she says. “I hate farming.”

And so he’s the one to laugh, and kiss her cheek and hug her to him. “What’d you rather be doing then?”

“Theys puttin’ up a bank. I always been good with figures. And you, you’ll be a top-notch lawyer,” she says against his chest. “I can’t wait to see it happen.”

Then she lifts her face and kisses him, sweet and burning, and they spend a while like this, giving and taking in tandem—until his whole heart is gone, given to her, and hers has filled the vacancy.

She links her fingers through his and they go to find Sarah Elizabeth.

xx

The clerk says, “Cap, think that’s your crowd pulling up.”

Cap looks up from his desk. The front window looks out on the main thoroughfare, and across the street is a café with a hitching post out front. A wagon is parked there, just arrived—a bareheaded boy is tying up the reins to the post. He’s no more than seven but he does his task with the ease of one who has done it a hundred times before. The summer sun makes his hair shine white as corn silk.

A woman is perched on the wagon seat, twisted at the waist to speak to those in the bed. She pauses to wave at passerby calling out greetings. The place beside her is empty; the boy won the prized spot, apparently. In the wagon bed are three more figures, all girls, all flaxen-haired. The eldest is still on the cusp of womanhood but has already started to bloom; she’ll be as lovely as her mother if not more so. Cap can see the apples in the cheeks of the two little girls from where he sits. They are bouncing where they stand, trying to clamber over the sides, their feet searching for the wheel rims.

He smiles, stands, tells the clerk he’ll be away for lunch. Then he picks up his hat and steps out into the sunshine.


End file.
